The Film Music of Nick Cave and Warren Ellis concert program

PRESENT

FILM MUSIC

NICK CAVE AND WARREN ELLIS

PERFORMING LIVE WITH THE MELBOURNE SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA P RO G RAM

8 – 10 AU GU ST 20 1 9

MeLBOURNE SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA Benjamin Northey conductor Nick Cave and Warren Ellis All music by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis.

Arrangements by Nicholas Buc. The Proposition

[18']

West of Memphis

[12']

The Road

[16']

Hell or High Water

[14']

Wind River

[11']

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

[20']

Not suitable for people under 15. Under 15s must be accompanied by a parent or adult guardian.

Yamaha, supplying the world’s best musical instruments.

Footage from “Hell or High Water” (2016) supplied courtesy of Madman Entertainment. Madman is a leading independent film and television distribution company renowned for its commitment to quality Australian films, international features and documentary content. For more information please visit madmanfilms.com.au.

Running time: approximately one hour and 45 minutes with no interval. Timings listed are approximate.

Assistive hearing: A hearing system is available from Arts Centre Melbourne ushers, providing coverage to all seats via headphones or neck-loops.

In consideration of your fellow patrons, the MSO thanks you for silencing and dimming the light on your phone.

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra is a leading cultural figure in the Australian arts landscape, bringing the best in orchestral music and passionate performance to a diverse audience across Victoria, the nation and around the world.

Each year the MSO engages with more than 5 million people through live concerts, TV, radio and online broadcasts, international tours, recordings and education programs.

The MSO regularly attracts great artists from around the globe including Anne-Sophie Mutter, Lang Lang, Renee Fleming and Thomas Hampson, while bringing Melbourne’s finest musicians to the world through tours to China, Europe and the United States.

Under the spirited leadership of Chief Conductor, Sir Andrew Davis, the MSO is a vital presence, both onstage and in the community, in cultivating classical music in Australia. The nation’s first professional orchestra, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra has been the sound of the city of Melbourne since 1906.

The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the Land on which we perform and would like to pay our respects to their Elders and Community both past and present.

3

BENJAMIN NORTHEY conductor Benjamin Northey is Chief Conductor of the Christchurch Symphony Orchestra and Associate Conductor of Melbourne Symphony Orchestra.

Winner of the 2019 Limelight Magazine Australian Artist of the Year award, Northey appears regularly as guest conductor with all major Australian and New Zealand symphony orchestras, Opera Australia, New Zealand Opera and State Opera South Australia.

His international appearances include concerts with London Philharmonic Orchestra, the Hong Kong, Tokyo and Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestras, the National Orchestra of Colombia and the Mozarteum Orchestra Salzburg.

A strong advocate for music by Australian composers, his progressive approach to repertoire includes collaborations with a broad range of artists including Pinchas Zukerman, Maxim Vengerov and Anne-Sofie von Otter, as well as KD Lang, Tim Minchin and James Morrison.

His awards include the 2001 Symphony Australia Young Conductor of the Year, the prestigious 2010 Melbourne Prize Outstanding Musician’s Award and multiple awards for his many recordings with ABC Music.

NICHOLAS BUC ARRANGER Nicholas Buc is a composer, conductor and arranger. As the recipient of the Brian May Scholarship, he completed a Master’s degree in Scoring for Film and Multimedia at New York University, receiving the Elmer Bernstein Award for Film Scoring.

He has composed music for film and television, with work screened at festivals and theatres around Australia, Asia and the US. His commissioned works have been premiered by the Royal Melbourne Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir, The Australian Voices, and the Melbourne Chamber Orchestra.

Nicholas has worked with Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, Chris Botti, Amanda Palmer, Ben Folds and was conductor/arranger for Tina Arena on six Australian tours. He has written arrangements for Missy Higgins, Passenger, Eskimo Joe, and The Whitlams, as well as working on five seasons of The Voice Australia.

In 2018 he joined forces with the Tokyo Philharmonic to conduct all 3 original Star Wars films in one day, and this August will conduct the world premiere of Disney’s live action remake of The Lion King.

4

NICK CAVE AND WARREN ELLIS COMPOSERS

Nick Cave and Warren Ellis create film and theatre scores that are elegantly minimal, hauntingly beautiful and instantly recognisable as theirs alone. Full of light and shade, creeping dread and inconsolable yearning, these heavily instrumental sound paintings inject aching humanity into ghostly frontier towns, parched desert landscapes, post-apocalyptic war zones and extra-terrestrial vistas. Most are rooted in the duo’s improvised piano and violin interplay, though their more recent scores have embraced a broader orchestral and electronic palette.

Vocals are rare and sparing. But even without lyrics, they are always lyrical.

According to Cave, discovering Ellis’ deep archive of violin loops was a crucial tipping point, laying the foundations for the duo’s unorthodox composition methods. “It was suddenly an amazing way to write because you didn’t have to do things from scratch,” he explains. “Warren would put on a loop that would create this instant atmosphere, and we could go off and work on top of that. To sit at a piano, put chords onto a linear loop and make something out of that is a very pleasurable way to work.”

Cave and Ellis followed The Proposition with a trio of kinetic theatre pieces for the feted Icelandic actor-director Gisli Örn Gardarsson: Woyzeck (2006), Metamorphosis (2006) and Faust (2010).

Their speedy composing techniques allowed them to take risks on this kind of left-field production, where raw creative energy takes precedence over budget. They also added plaintive tones and drones to two acclaimed documentaries: Geoffrey Smith’s The English Surgeon (2007), about an exiled doctor’s struggle to bring modern neurosurgery to post-Soviet Ukraine, and Matthew Watson’s The Girls of Phnom Penh (2009), a compassionate portrait of sex workers in Cambodia.

While Cave and Ellis have played together in the Bad Seeds and related projects since 1995, their career as score composers only blossomed more recently, evolving from the indie movie margins to embrace major, Oscar-nominated Hollywood features.

The duo created their first suite of cinematic soundscapes for The Proposition (2005), directed by fellow Australian and frequent collaborator John Hillcoat. Scripted by Cave himself, this brutal Outback western starred Guy Pearce, Ray Winstone, Emily Watson and Danny Huston.

Bedded in looped violin motifs, these widescreen instrumentals and hushed ballads evoked the dusty grandeur and sweltering savagery of the story’s elemental desert setting.

Meanwhile, big studio work beckoned in the shape of Andrew Dominik’s elegiac anti-western The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007), starring Brad Pitt and Casey 5

bootlegging thriller Lawless (2012), starring Tom Hardy and Jessica Chastain. Cave adapted the screenplay while he and Ellis assembled a wilfully anachronistic selection of bluegrass cover versions, performed with a supergroup ensemble of Americana legends including Willie Nelson, Emmylou Harris and Mark Lanegan.

Affleck. Because of post-production delays, the score was composed before Cave and Ellis saw a single frame of the finished film. Even so, these sepia-tinted sound paintings and retro-rustic ballads proved a perfect fit for Dominik’s visually sumptuous psychological study of Old West folklore. Cave even played a rare acting cameo, as a yelping saloon-bar minstrel.

Cave and Ellis reunited with director John Hillcoat for his sombre adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s dystopian novel The Road (2009), starring Viggo Mortensen as a loving father guiding his young son across the ash-strewn ruins of a postapocalyptic America. Their artfully minimal score combines mournful piano with clanging industrial percussion, heartsick longing and lurking malice.

An anthology album of the duo’s early film music, White Lunar, was also released in 2009.

Expanding their horizons for their next cinematic collaboration, Cave and Ellis created a ravishing score for director David Olehoffen’s Far From Men (2014). A triple prize-winner at the Venice film festival, this Algeria-set drama stars Viggo Mortensen and Reda Kateb in a powerful tale of divided loyalties and colonialist violence. With its mesmeric drones, pointillist piano jabs, weeping strings and nerve-jangling electronics, this lightly experimental musical tapestry sounds both achingly intimate and cosmically vast.

After contributing to Everardo Valerio Gout’s award-winning Mexican crime thriller Days of Grace (2011), Cave and Ellis composed a full score for Amy Berg’s true-life documentary West of Memphis (2012), about a notoriously controversial murder case in Arkansas. The duo then changed musical gear for their next John Hillcoat collaboration, the blood-soaked Depression-era

The duo then reunited with Amy Berg to provide the suitably anguished, ominous score for her next documentary Prophet’s Prey (2015), a highly acclaimed expose of religious cult leader Warren Jeffs, which Cave also narrated. Returning to the American West, Cave and Ellis added an elegiac undertow to David McKenzie’s masterful heist thriller Hell or High Water (2016) with their

(clockwise from top left) The Proposition, West of Memphis, Hell or High Water, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford 6

achingly melancholy moodscapes, which sounds as parched and poetically lonely as the expansive Texan vistas on screen. Starring Chris Pine, Jeff Bridges and Ben Foster, McKenzie’s fatalistic neo-western won critical acclaim and four Oscar nominations. The duo then switched into more futuristic mode for National Geographic’s epic TV series Mars (2016), an innovative hybrid of drama and documentary produced by Ron Howard and Brian Grazer. Their score humanises the lonely vastness of deep space with its gentle electronic crackles, plaintive keyboard sighs and weightless sci-fi lullabies.

For David Michôd’s satirical drama War Machine (2017), a Netflix-backed satire on U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan, Cave and Ellis renewed a longstanding connection with Brad Pitt that dates back to Cave’s supporting role in Tom DiCillo’s Johnny Suede (1991). In elegant counterpoint to the bombastic farce on screen, their heavily synthetic score is subtle and textured, densely layered and richly toned, with a pulsing Krautrock feel in places.

The duo’s most recent cinematic score was for Kings (2017), a romantic drama set against the Rodney King riots that shook Los Angeles in 1992.

Starring Halle Berry and Daniel Craig, the film was directed by Deniz Gamze Ergüven, whose prize-winning coming-of-age debut Mustang (2015) featured a solo score by Ellis. Returning to a more restrained mode, this is classic Cave and Ellis mix of mournful melody, hushed beauty and soul-stirring tenderness. As with all of the duo’s film music, it is a stand-alone work, with a spellbinding power that often pushes against the surface drama on screen to define its own emotional terrain.

In recent years, Cave and Ellis scores have edged closer to the sonic terrain of their work with the Bad Seeds, notably the luxuriant sound paintings on their magisterial 2016 album Skeleton Tree.

The parallels are evident on Wind River (2017), a superior murder thriller set on a Native American reservation in Wyoming, which was scripted and directed by Hell or High Water screenwriter Taylor Sheridan. Bringing more orchestration and vocals into their usually spartan instrumental palette, Cave and Ellis lend epic drama to the film’s majestic wintry landscapes with rousing string arrangements, haunting choral chants and softly whispered laments.

“Very often a tension can happen between music and picture that is about chance and a kind of unknowingness that can be really amazing,” Cave says. “Just by putting together two things that were created in isolation, music and film, suddenly something quite magical can happen.”

Film clips and stills courtesy of: The Proposition (2015) The Film Consortium West of Memphis (2012) The Road (2009) & Wind River (2017) Hell or High Water (2016) The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2017) The Road (top), Wind River (bottom) 7

MSO/ BRIAN COX/ A SYMPHONIC UNIVERSE DANIEL HARDING CONDUCTOR JACK LIEBECK VIOLIN black

NOVEMBER 2019

Arts Centre Melbourne, Hamer Hall white

BOOK NOW mso.com.au